Guardian Cryptic 29,227 by Tramp

58 comments on “Guardian Cryptic 29,227 by Tramp”

1. Well after this morning’s mix-up, I was delighted to see the setter’s name, and his couple of football clues (groans from elsewhere I’m sure). Just a CLASS ACT with favourites – CLEARANCE SALES, OPPOSITE NUMBER, SYLLABUS, RULE OF LAW, PREAMBLES, DERBY, CANOODLES, CLOTHES HORSE (great spot) and WANNABEES (less common version of WANNABE). Super puzzle.

   Ta Tramp & manehi.

2. I parsed PREAMBLES as P + E inside RAMBLES but both work equally as well.

3. I read 20D as “having nap” or the scrubbly quality of cloth that terry-cloth has abundantly. I wonder if that’s where the infant accessory has its name from?

4. Some really nice surfaces eg for CLEARANCE SALES, CANOODLES, CLOTHES HORSE and LIMB. I also liked the wordplays in OPPOSITE NUMBER and TRUMP. Luckily, I spotted RICHTER SCALE from the definition early on, which gave me a good toehold for a number of Across clues.

   Thanks Tramp and manehi.

5. AlanC @2 – that makes more sense with “during” indicating containment/inclusion. I’ll add to the blog

6. Slow start and quick finish. Only parsing problem was my recurring blindness to “game” = RU. Think DERBY might be unfair to foreign solvers but let’s hear it for localism in our globalised world!
   Thanks both.

7. The one I had trouble with was the BY part of DERBY: otherwise a very enjoyable solve. Interesting to see the drier as a CLOTHES HORSE, which is what I call it – I only learned the equivalent Northern term “maiden” from seeing it in crosswords.

   I got confused by the possibilities for parsing PREAMBLES too, but eventually arrived at AlanC’s version.

8. I’m confused. Guardian Australia online showing cryptic 29,227 by Kite. I solved this iteration, but not sure I understand all the clues. Maybe I just got up too early for the UK version?.

9. Tramp version now up in Oz. Looks like we got 2 for 1 down under

10. Stu@9 the Kite was last week if you want to check the answers.

11. After the déja vu on the Grauniad app (still not resolved), which I did tackle as a memory test – a few clues I had to puzzle over again – I turned to the website, where fortunately the interactive crossword had been changed.

    Lovely one from Tramp, as usual. Some great constructions and surfaces, especially RICHTER SCALE, CANOODLES WANNABEES and OPPOSITE NUMBER. The two football clues are excellent; I think Trump is of the blue persuasion, so he must have set the one for DERBY with a heavy heart 🙂

    Many thanks to Neil and manehi

12. Thanks for the blog, a lot of neat clues , especially the longer entries. I agree with AlanC for PREAMBLES due to the “during” .

13. Tramp, not Trump! Profound apologies for inadvertent insult 🙁

14. [ AlanC @ 1 and 2 and an improvement to 2D , I think 5 bonus points in order . I make it 36 v -20 for now. Have been very busy and not reading the blogs, I will now check last week for points and possible penalties . ]

15. Trump is definitely RED , I always find this strange looking at USA election maps.

16. [Roz @14: I’m being extra cautious now. I lol at your Spooner comment yesterday].

17. Alastair @6: one doesn’t solve British crosswords for very long before learning (if you didn’t know already) both the names of the big Premier League clubs and the footballing definition of the word DERBY. So no problems here in Chicago anyway. Maybe it helps that I’m also a sports fan in general, though. [Too bad we don’t have the word derby: when my beloved White Sox come up to Wrigleyville to play the Cubs (or when the Cubs go down to 35th St) the local press calls it the Crosstown Classic; the equivalent event in New York is the Subway Series. Both names are too cutesy for my liking.]

    In general I found this puzzle good clean fun. The clue for TRUMP was particularly nice; even Republicans cannot object now that we have a judicial ruling that the man was not entirely honest!

18. 3d DERBY
    I had an alternative explanation for BY: eg ‘by’ Rembrandt, not ‘after’ (aka ‘school of’) Rembrandt.
    I think either works, but maybe mine is a little obscure.
    Thanks both for an enjoyable crossword and blog.

19. Roz @15: TRUMP is indeed red, according to the perverse colouration of US political parties. It is Tramp who is the Evertonian.

20. Roz @15: This is a historical legacy. Before Nixon, the Southern Strategy, and Realignment in the late 1960s, [southern parts of] the Democratic Party were the more conservative party, hence Blue, while the Republican Party used to be the more liberal, hence Red. Nixon and his circle of advisers decided that power was more important than principle, and here we are…

21. Thanks for the blog and thanks to others for the comments.

    I call a clothes horse a maiden: I’ve clued that at least once.

    When it comes to football, Gervase is correct, I am an Evertonian and that clue was hard to write. It’s difficult to admit, but, Liverpool don’t fear Everton.

    Some people don’t like football clues. No knowledge of football is needed to solve 8.

    Neil

22. I’m very happy that most apparently football-related clues turn out to require no actual knowledge of football! I did like the Chelsea/Arsenal one.

23. Almost in a panic at first as I hardly made an impression early on. First one in was TOMMYROT, glad I knew that one. Perambles instead of PREAMBLES meant that CLEARANCE SALES took a while to find its way across the top half. Couldn’t parse LUNACY. Pleased with my knowledge of two letter Greek letters, if you see what I mean, and therefore getting PIXIE. And the smile when TRUMP was arrived at soon after. Last two in the SAWTOOTH and WANNABEES, had wondered for a while if that might have been Wanderers. Some cracking clues today, I thought…

24. Well thank goodness for the down clues, or I’d never have made headway.

    Favorites were the football clues.

    For anyone else who attempted the online Kite puzzle last night before the G. realized the error of its ways: how many clues did you do before you figured out it was the wrong puzzle? I was on the third, after marvelling at two amazing coincidences. [The pdf version was Tramp from the start, so I then switched to that.] For once, the G. comments, which came in thick and fast last night, were rather amusing.

25. For SAWTOOTH I took it as the waveform , used in a CRO and the old TVs , I suppose it is a type of pattern.
    Thank you Jacob @20 , nice to get a bit of the background.
    MrPenney@17 I am told that certain derby matches in football also have a name .
    Real Madrid v Barcelona is El Clasico
    KPR v Reading is El Cheerio .

26. [ AlanC @ 16 I note that you have been productive and wise , 2 more points so it is now
    36 v -18 . My Spoonerism comment was a bit too late yesterday ]

27. @rogergs. I believe it is a changed form of napkin and I think at least some North Americans still refer to the baby sanitary thing as a napkin (in addition to using the word diaper)

28. Thanks Blogger for those last few parsings and Thanks Setter for a real challenge.

    Btw re Derby. Just last night I heard the ESPN advertising announcer using the word Derby meaning two teams from same town playing. It was regarding a UK soccer match being shown but I am sure I have heard it in other contexts (but not for US sports)

29. Are there really nappies made of terrycloth? The only ones I’ve seen were flat and plain. (But then I haven’t changed a baby except for my brother, who’s in his sixties now.) I took “nap” to mean the surface of terrycloth, as has been mentioned.

    manehi, thanks for parsing DERBY (I didn’t know that meaning, or that Liverpool fans were reds) and OPPOSITE NUMBER. I’ve only seen “wannabe” spelled with one E, so that one eluded me for a while.

    Thanks, Picaroon and manehi.

30. I’m Tramp, not Picaroon. I’m honoured by the comparison.

31. [All my babies were in terry towelling nappies, soaked in diluted bleach overnight and ideally dried in the sun (ha ha). You can still get them but only from certain online companies that are trying to help save the planet from disposables. You can still get the muslin ones though, which are mostly used to mop up dribbles, but I used them on new-horns. I say all, we adopted two and managed to give birth to two. Lots of hand-me-downs]
    Thanks Tramp and manehi for a fun solve and parse

32. Thanks Tramp. I found this on the easy end of the Tramp spectrum but still quite good. I’m a fan of clues that tell little stories so this fit the bill. I particularly liked SAWTOOTH and WANNABEES for their surfaces and SPAGHETTI for its anagram. Thanks manehi for the blog.

33. [Roz @ 25&26: very funny although I seem to have gone from the earlier 20 to 18. Probably one of your scientific reductive theories].

34. [The term DERBY is also used in Italy for matches between two local soccer teams, but with special names relating to features of the city: Inter vs Milan is the Derby della Madonnina, Juventus vs Torino is the Derby della Mole, Roma vs Lazio is the Derby Capitolino, and there are many others. In Glasgow, Rangers vs Celtic is the Auld (Old) Firm derby, from which Norwich City vs Ipswich Town is sometimes ridiculed as the Old Farm derby]

35. [They also have derbis in Spain and dérbis in Portugal.]

36. [AlanC @33 your score has gone up by 2 from MINUS 20 to MINUS 18. After your third offence you went into administration at minus 25 , perhaps you will learn that crime does not pay.
    My students called the recent Manchester derby the Mobius band derby . ]

37. Great fun. But I thought it was only toddlers for whom the present was the (cardboard) box. I’m always hoping there’s something inside it.

38. Just had #37 brought to my attention. Nowt to do with me!

39. HarpoSpeaks @37: Archaic usage: a Christmas box was a present and not just a container. And St Stephen’s Day is known as Boxing Day in Britain and many Commonwealth countries because it used to be traditional to give presents to the poor on 26 December – as in ‘Old King Wenceslas’.

40. Roz @36 🙂

41. I suspected that there was no chance of parsing DERBY, and it would appear that I was right. I fail on most sport connections, and especially when UK knowledge is also required. CLEARANCE SALES was another “Huh?”, and I was educated in relation to nappies. All else was challenging but achievable.

42. BTW the third definition in [my] Chambers for TERRY is “”a baby’s towelling nappy”

43. CLEARANCE SALES needs no knowledge of football to solve, in the same way OPPOSITE NUMBER needs no knowledge of plastic surgery. Admittedly, DERBY does require the knowledge that Liverpool are the Reds.

44. After watching cracking the cryptic and practicing on the Guardian Cryptic I was cock-a-hoop to get 1D right of the bat! I had to drag wife out of her slumber to explain how happy I was to have solved 12A, favourite clue was 8A as the whole clue just made sense to me as soon as I read it and I knew what needed doing. I managed to solve 21/28. So flipping chuffed right now

45. Gervase @39
    I thought the point of Boxing Day was that a Christmas box was given to a tradesman who delivered, but had Christmas Day itself off.

46. [gladys @7, now maiden = CLOTHES HORSE takes me back, with memories of mum at the washing machine with two rollers and a handle on top to “hand wring” the clothes before getting the maiden out if it wasn’t a sunny day.]

47. @Roz
    #November 14, 2023 at 11:40 am
    Stu@9 the Kite was last week if you want to check the answers.”

    Thanks for the heads up Roz

48. Seeing Tramp’s name, I know we’re in for a challenge!

    I’m not so sure about RICHTER SCALE: surely it’s a measure of the effect of ‘changing plates’, not a measure of the plate movement itself. A bit too loose for my liking.

    Otherwise nothing to complain of. I liked SAWTOOTH especially, my LOI, very ingenious and amusing surface – I was earlier (without the crossers) trying words like LIFTCAGE and the like! Also ticks for OLD SCHOOL (good misdirection), WANNABEES (I didn’t bother to check the spelling, I assumed Chambers would have both variants); CANOODLES (another nice, a bit risqué surface); RAPID; CLEARANCE SALES (surface a bit long-winded but it works!).

    Thanks Tramp and Manehi.

49. TimC @46: the device you describe is called a ‘mangle‘ – at least, it was in my youthful household. Yes I remember the nanny working away at wringing out the clothes before hanging them out to dry.

    I thought the word ‘maiden’ had a more sinister interpretation. It refers to a type of guillotine that was in use in Edinburgh in the 16th to 18th centuries. Ouch! But this bit of GK might be useful to cruciverbalists in time to come.

50. Laccaria@48. So you would insert “effect of” in ‘measure for changing plates’ to make the definition less “loose”, but at the expense of losing the surface reading which is about dental work; or perhaps you didn’t realise that a plate is a partial denture?

    Even without this, I wouldn’t have complained about your perceived looseness – I’ve seen plenty that are much looser than that in recent weeks. Even the Quick crossword in G2 has featured some pretty loose definitions recently – it’s all part of the cruciverbal fun!

    And yours @49: I remember mangles, but it was my mother who used it – we used to ask to have a go, but our arms were too small to turn the handle effectively. I wish I could have suggested hiring a nanny, I’m sure she’d have jumped at the chance.

51. Due to the online glitch, I didn’t get around to this until Thursday. Well worth the wait. Thanks Tramp, and also to manehi for clearing up a couple of lingering doubts, such as where the T came from in SAWTOOTH.

52. I remember in the 70s my mother had a top loading washing machine with mangles attached and working electriclally. Clothes went from the machine to a sink of cold water for rinsing , then through the mangle to the sink drainer , then in a separate little spin drier ( like R2D2 ) then clothes line or maiden. I am so glad that I have only had to use automatic washing machines, but the maiden has survived, very useful for small things in the sun.

53. In my childhood we had the “wringer table”: a small kitchen table with a metal top that unfolded to reveal a set of rollers and a handle. Less of an effort than a full-scale mangle, so it was my job to put the washing through before it went out onto the line. Later we bought one of those R2D2 spin driers, a very efficient little beast.

54. I remember mangles and then the one on the early washing machine. A hazard for someone with long hair like me in those days. You could terribly mangled, and if you were too far away from the off switch, you could get scalped. Eeek!

55. Gladys and PDM , the spin driers were very powerful and effective, much better than just the mangle , water would pour out of a front spout into a bowl. It was my job to put clothes in, wrap them around the edge .
    There are stories of the electric mangles being very dangerous with hair and other things, I do not think they were around for too long, the twin-tub came in and soon after the front loading automatic .

56. TRUMP was a pretty special clue, as were so many others; I just love this man (Tramp, NOT Trump!!). When I see the name Tramp on a crossword (a particularly pleasant surprise after the bathos of seeing the repeat of a somewhat pedestrian, and unchallenging offering from last week!) I get the same inward joy that Arachne used to trigger ….
    Gervase@11 sums this up in the first, short sentence of his second paragraph
    Bless you, Neil, for your high level entertainment and thanks to manehi for your unending sterling work and generosity of your time (you are helping to hold the interest of so many, probably lurking, potential solvers that your contribution, and other bloggers’, to cruciverbalism’s future health should not be undervalued and cannot be overstated!)

57. Thank you

58. SheffieldHatter@50 – just noticed your response:
    “or perhaps you didn’t realise that a plate is a partial denture?”

    That’s ironic! 🙂 Just been to the dentist earlier today. I’m in the process of having a couple of implants fitted – while I’m waiting for them to ‘bed down’ into the bone, before the crowns can be fitted, I’ve got to put up with a denture. With, of course, a plate. Not something I’m absolutely thrilled with! 🙁 Especially now the implants have been put in and the denture no longer fits well…

    Yes I’ve learnt an awful lot about dental procedures over the past few months!

    I also know a bit about geology… But I agree with you – OK – let “measure for changing plates” stand. It’s not perfect but how many clues are? It’ll do fine.

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